


Cosmic Love and Monsters

by MegaBadBunny



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: (although there will be lemons later), (but they are very much consensual Tentoo x Rose lemons), (i mean he technically "dies" but he's the master so does he ever really stay dead?), (no sexual violence here whatsoever), (not in a sexy way), (please check out the version on fanfiction.net if you prefer no lemons), Action/Adventure, Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Dimension-Hopping Rose Tyler, Episode AU: s04e13 Journey's End, Episode Fix-It: s04e13 Journey's End, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Fluff, Fluff and Smut, Identity Reveal, Imprisonment, Mistaken Identity, Not Really Character Death, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Reunions, Romance, Tags Contain Spoilers, Timey-Wimey, be warned from here on out:
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:34:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25638847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MegaBadBunny/pseuds/MegaBadBunny
Summary: Over a hundred jumps now, over a hundred universes, and never, ever, not in even a single one of them, has Rose ever told anyone who she is—there’s only one person right here, right now, who could possibly know her name.“Doctor?” Rose says, her voice quiet, uncertain. Only the littlest bit hopeful.
Relationships: Metacrisis Tenth Doctor & The Master (Dhawan), Metacrisis Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler, The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Rose Tyler, The Master & Rose Tyler, The Master (Dhawan) & Rose Tyler, spoiler tags follow
Comments: 17
Kudos: 68





	1. The Possible Planet

“Sorry, sweetheart,” says the guard. It’s difficult to tell under the mask, but she swears she sees gentleness in the man’s eyes, or the ghost of gentleness-past, perhaps. “You en’t got a choice.”

Sighing heavily, the guard shakes his head. “None of us have.”

He shoves the spear into her grasp and pushes her out into the light.

She throws a hand in front of her face to shield her eyes from the blinding brightness, but it doesn’t do anything to help with the sheer wall of _noise_. It’s as if she is at the beach at high tide, and someone is blasting the crash and thunder of the waves through a series of megaphones all around her. Slowly, her eyes adjust to the dazzling white and she lowers her hand, cautiously, to reveal a giant set of bleached stone walls flanking her on all sides, an enormous oval amphitheatre of stone arches and pillars and heavy wooden doors; it’s all very much like something out of a medieval storybook, as if horses and knights with lances might ride out any moment now to compete for the favor of their king. Atop the walls sit thousands upon thousands of spectators of all species and genders and shades of the rainbow. The audience cheers and shouts, clapping hands and stomping feet and hollering in a cacophonous mix of languages both Earthlike and distinctly _not_.

So, that explains the noise. But it doesn’t explain where the hell she is, or what she’s doing here, or _why_.

A quick scan of the stadium around her reveals a patchwork outer stage of wooden platforms and rigs replete with chains and ropes and walls—places to climb, places to hide, places to trap. And she watches as, filtering through doorways much like hers, perhaps a dozen other players creep out into the arena, some of them cheering right back at the audience, others cowering in the dirt, all of them clad in ill-fitting and ill-assorted pieces of armor, just like her. Fighters, she realizes. Fellow fighters.

And the audience all around them is screaming for blood.

A fighter looks her way, fear evident in the violent trembling of the sword clutched in their hands. _At least we’ve got something in common_ , she thinks grimly, and offers them what she hopes is a reassuring nod.

A voice roars out above the din, voice booming throughout the arena, and the ruckus around her multiplies exponentially, competing with the desperate _thump-thump-thump_ of her blood hammering in her ears. Now the audience is chanting as one. She doesn’t understand the language, but the shape of the chant, its ritual pauses and deliberate cadence, tells her everything she needs to know—it’s a countdown.

She glances down at her watch. Eleven more minutes until the Cannon is recharged. She can survive eleven minutes.

(Right?)

“ _Let the games begin!”_

Heavy wooden doors all around the stadium slowly creak open, each of them revealing a dark, monstrous silhouette housing a pair of bright-shining eyes. Ear-splitting roars echo throughout the stage and the audience responds in kind, each of them screaming and shouting until she can’t tell which scream is spectator and which is beast.

Ten more minutes.

Her grip on her spear tightens and she screams out a roar of her own.

**

Ten monsters down, two to go; the wood and sand beneath Rose’s feet is a gruesome rainbow oil-slick, stained with the blood of beasts and combatants alike, and some of it drips red from her. She grits her teeth and tears off a length of her overshirt and winds it around the weeping gash on her thigh, rasps out a quick _thanks_ to the fellow fighter who helps her where her trembling fingers fail.

(Three minutes left and it hurts, horribly, that she can’t take any of the combatants back when she makes her jump to safety. She hates it. She hates it so much she can taste it, bitter and bile.)

A monster swipes at her newfound friend and she grabs the fighter, pulling them into a roll with her. Shouting in anger, she hurls her spear straight into the flank of the creature, pinning it to the ground.

One monster and three minutes left.

“You do realize that after we dispatch this one, they’ll turn us on each other?” asks one of the other fighters. “What do we do then?”

Earlier, she had silently cursed her helmet and the way it made sweat roll down her forehead. Now she’s grateful for the way its face-guard conceals her lie.

“We’ll stand together and fight back,” she says.

Two minutes left.

The last beast pounces on a fighter and without even thinking, she sprints toward it, leaping onto a platform-suspended chain and bodily swinging into the beast, knocking it off its victim. She and the monster roll in the dirt and she wrenches a bloodied scimitar out of the sand—the beast rounds back, lunges for her and she pulls back the scimitar, ready to—

“ _Stop_!”

A voice rings out across the stadium, cutting through all other noise like a knife.

The instant the creature’s claws reach her, it freezes in midair, body convulsing with an invisible charge. Digging at its collar, whining, the beast backs down, ears flattening, head shaking in pain. The creature’s whimpers seem unnaturally loud in the now-silent stadium. It’s as if, once that mysterious voice spoke, everyone is holding their breath. Everyone but her.

Panting with exertion, she slowly pushes up and out of the dirt, the scimitar held shakingly in front of her while she scans the crowd of spectators for any sign of her unseen savior.

“You, there!” barks the voice from before. “In the blue leather. Unmask yourself!”

She glances down at her wristwatch. Just fifteen seconds now. If she can hold out for just fifteen more seconds—

“Combatant! Remove your helmet or the beasts will do it for you!”

Grudgingly, she reaches up with one hand and fumbles at the battered metal helm, pulling it off and tossing it to the ground in a puff of multicolored sand. “Satisfied?” she shouts. “Drink your fill, cos it’s the last you’ll see of it!”

Right on cue, her wristwatch starts its telltale chirp, and she drops her scimitar, ready to slam the button that will take her home.

“ _Rose Tyler!_ ”

Her palm is mere millimeters from the button when it halts at the sound of her name, echoing through the stadium like a gunshot.

Rose’s blood rushes in her ears. Her heart catches in her throat.

Over a hundred jumps now, over a hundred universes, and never, ever, not in even a single one of them, has Rose ever told anyone who she is.

_How could anyone here know her name?_

Eyes narrowed in suspicion, heart convulsing painfully, Rose hesitates. She searches the faces in the crowd, trying her damnedest to discern between one stranger and the next, but nobody looks familiar, not at this distance, anyway. Something churns uncomfortably in her gut, telling her no, no, no, don’t be ridiculous, this place is a literal death-trap, _escape while you can_ ; something else tells her that _there’s only one person right here, right now, who could possibly know your name_.

“Doctor?” Rose says, her voice quiet, uncertain. Only the littlest bit hopeful.

Murmurs ripple through the audience around her, sound leaking back in little by little as the voice, no longer amplified, still shouts sharp and loud enough to be heard, “Bring her to me. Unharmed!”

Rose doesn’t fight the guards that come for her, nor does she allow herself to feel the tiny flame of hope struggling to flicker and burn deep inside. Instead, she goes with the guards willingly, allowing them to guide her away from the carnage. She spares a glance for her fellow combatants; her frightened little friend offers her a wave and she nods in response, but most of the fighters just watch, dumbfounded, looking every bit as puzzled as Rose feels. But Doctor or not—and as much as she would love it to be him, Rose is leaning toward _Not_ at the moment, considering that she can’t imagine any scenario in which he would willingly stay present for such a grotesque display—maybe she at least managed to buy some of her fellow captives an extra day.

Besides, it would be foolish not to check out this lead, no matter how slim it may be. There’s no way she’ll allow herself to come so far, and fight so hard, and risk so much, just to chicken out at the last second. She’ll check, she’ll do her due diligence, and she’ll leave whenever she needs to. She’s got her hopper. She’s got the Cannon back home. She’s safe.

“Never known his Lordship to demand an audience with a fighter,” admits the guard from earlier, with a sidelong nervous glance Rose’s way. “What d’you suppose he wants with you?”

Rose swallows down her anxieties and straightens her shoulders with a confidence she doesn’t quite feel.

“Guess we’ll find out,” she murmurs.

***


	2. The Merging of the Ways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The figure’s head tilts. “Rose,” the man says, his voice hushed, almost reverent. Wrapping around her name just the way his used to. “Don’t you recognize me?”

Eighty-four minutes and approximately a thousand instances of _Is this really necessary?_ later, Rose is officially Done With All This Nonsense™. She is tired of being jostled by this squadron of overeager attendants flitting about like a legion of white-clad, silver-collared paparazzi (had enough of all that back home, thanks), she’s tired of being led from one ridiculously ornate chamber to another (stone walls and columns, vaulted ceilings, crystal light fixtures, rich tapestries, silks and satins and furs and everything gold-gilded and immaculate and glimmering and _enough with the tacky faux-medieval décor already_ ), and she’s sick to death of being pampered and scrubbed and polished and preened-over like some kind of fancy poodle at a dog show. Despite her many (and increasingly vehement) protests, the attendants have stripped Rose of her trustworthy clothes, leaving her feeling a little vulnerable and more than a little irritated standing in some fancy poncy gown with all the trimmings. More and more, she is certain that the bloke who summoned her is just some wealthy outer-space arsehole, someone she met on one of her many travels with the Doctor and simply forgot about somehow; certainly it can’t be the Doctor, because he would know that they haven’t got time for this fussing about, not to mention that _the Doctor wouldn’t give even a single shit how she was dressed_. At any rate, by the time the attendants start bedecking her in flipping _jewelry_ of all things, placing combs in her hair and fastening a fancy golden collar-necklace round her neck and even going so far as to slip rings on her fingers (and fret over the state of her nails, of all the stupid things), Rose is so frustrated she’s tempted to slam the button that will take her home purely out of sheer impatience.

“No,” she says firmly when one of the attendants moves to unclasp her wristwatch. “That stays.”

The attendant flashes her a patronizing smile. “But milady, it’s such a dirty thing, and his Lordship simply does not abide dirty things. If you will only allow me to—”

“Try it again,” Rose says sweetly through a smile of her own, one full of clenched teeth, “and you’ll get a faceful of my fist.”

Paling, the attendant draws back. “But, milady—”

“Nope! No more _milady_ this or _Lordship_ that,” Rose interrupts, standing so abruptly that several of the attendants fussing over her hair lose their balance and fall over. “I’m bloody well done playing dress-up,” she continues, pulling at the too-snug bodice of her ridiculous dress as she pushes her way through the crowd and ignores the sea of indignant titters left in her wake. “I know you lot are only trying to do your job, stupid as it is, but I’m on something of a tight schedule here and I haven’t got time for whatever other nonsense you’ve got in store. So you can either take me to your leader, or I’m gonna take a leap out the nearest window and hope for the best. Got it?”

The attendants glance at each other uncertainly. “But—”

“Got it?” Rose bites back, and as the attendants scurry away in a flurry of silver and white, laughter rises up behind her. She turns to see a figure standing in the open doorway, leaning against the frame, all casual elegance and sinuous grace.

She swallows, painfully. Tells herself not to be disappointed if it isn’t him. _When_ it isn’t him.

Unfortunately, at this distance, in this dim light, it’s impossible to tell. Though backlit by the yellow light spilling from the corridor behind him, painting the figure’s angles and outline a soft, almost-glowing gold, his face remains in shadow. Rose can’t quite make out his features, no matter how she strains to catch a hint of brown eyes or scattered freckles, beautiful cheekbones or ridiculous sideburns. But she still imagines she can sense the warmth in his smile.

“Right,” Rose says, steeling herself. “Who are you, what do you want, and why the hell have you got people dressing me up like a bloody Barbie?”

The man chuckles. “Haven’t changed even a little bit, have you?”

“Wouldn’t say that,” Rose replies warily.

The man laughs again, and the sound is different than Rose remembers. His voice is different, too, maybe softer somehow—or maybe she’s just remembering it wrong. Four years is a long time, after all. Though she’s convinced no amount of time would be long enough to forget something like the sound of the Doctor’s voice.

“Rose Tyler,” says the man, his words almost unbearably fond. “All fire and spirit and fight, swinging in on a rope to save the day like a little blonde Robin Hood. Just the way I remember. God, it’s good to see you.”

“Tell me who you are,” Rose demands.

The figure’s head tilts. “Rose,” the man says, his voice hushed, almost reverent. Wrapping around her name just the way _his_ used to. “Don’t you recognize me?”

Hope flares in Rose’s chest once again but she quashes it, for now. After so many jumps, so many wrong universes (and one that almost wasn’t but doesn’t bear thinking about, not unless she wants more nightmares about a morgue and a gurney and the ice-cold finality of his hand peeking out stiff and blue beneath the sheet), she’s not too keen to have her faith dashed on the rocks yet again. Hope, she has learned the hard way, is a precious commodity, and can’t be spent lightly on _what-if’s_ and _maybe-could-be’s_.

When Rose doesn’t reply (doesn’t dare to), the man steps forward into the light, the hair and the face and the everything of him brought into Rose’s field of vision in startling technicolor relief. Rose looks him over, cataloguing and double-cataloguing everything just to be certain—smart suit, dark hair, dark eyes, (hopeful eyes), kind smile—before her lips, suddenly dry, part so she can say:

“No.”

The man’s eyes flash with hurt, and Rose shakes her head, in confusion or apology, she’s not certain. “No, sorry,” she murmurs. “I’ve never seen you before.”

“Quite right, too,” says the man with a wistful smile, and Rose swallows around the lump that’s sprung up in her throat. “Would it help if I scrounged up some brown pinstripes, perhaps? Or maybe a jumper and a black leather jacket?”

“Wouldn’t hurt.”

The man laughs again, an unabashedly delighted thing, and gestures for the surrounding attendants to leave. “Rose Tyler,” he says, beaming, and _that_ looks just the way Rose remembers. “Wow. It feels good to say your name aloud again. Feels even better to say it to your face.”

Suddenly bashful, he averts his gaze as the last attendant filters out of the room. He tugs nervously on one ear and god, the gesture is so familiar that Rose _aches_. “I don’t suppose—I mean, I know I probably should have opened with this, but I don’t suppose I could give you a hug?”

Her lips purse. “Erm, yeah,” Rose says. “I guess that’d be—”

His arms have ensnared her before she can even finish her sentence.

Rose’s chest seizes up painfully and her arms wrap around him on instinct, hands fisting in his suit-jacket. He smells— _Christ_ , he smells good, not like how she remembers, but good. And he’s solid, not as slim as before but still lithe, still good to wrap her arms around. Shorter, too; she can feel his pulse hammering against her own ribs, his _double-pulse_ , as in _two hearts_ , and his arms tighten around her, just the way they used to, and he’s here, he’s real, he’s really—

“Doctor?” Rose whispers, her voice shaking, and the Doctor laughs again and it’s the most beautiful thing Rose has ever heard. He laughs and she starts to laugh too, haltingly, in starts at first but then unrestrained and unfettered, hope fizzing out of her lungs like air leaving a balloon. It’s her first proper laugh in what feels like years and she’s trembling with the force of it and now the Doctor is hugging her tightly enough to lift her off the floor, spinning her round and round and the skirt of her ridiculous gown is swirling and tangling about their ankles and then he’s setting her back down and between his embrace and the corset of her gown her ribs are being compressed so tightly she can’t breathe but she doesn’t care.

“Sorry,” the Doctor laughs, as if he only just now remembered that not everyone’s got a respiratory bypass, thanks. He pulls away, holding Rose at arms’-length as he looks her over, every detail, head-to-toe. “Sorry, I just can’t believe you’re really here.”

“That makes two of us,” Rose laughs shakily. “But, Doctor…”

Words fail her, dying away to nothingness outside her lips. Stepping back, she looks him up and down, really properly noting all the changes. This new face of his is longer, rounder, still youthful. (Still pretty.) He wears a suit once again, albeit one vastly different from anything his last incarnation would have made a habit of wearing; it’s a somber affair that could almost be mistaken for _boring_ if Rose couldn’t spot the subtle purple hue of the fabric, if she hadn’t spent the last four years impatiently fidgeting in the background of one dreadful high-function Vitex function after another, or she couldn’t immediately recognize the suit’s expensive wool and well-tailored cut. Between the suit and soft black leather gloves, Rose wonders if the last Doctor’s proclivity for hair maintenance just transferred to an eye for the fashionable this time around.

_The last Doctor_.

The thought of his face, his voice, twists inside her painfully and Rose has to clamp her eyes shut to keep the tears back. She didn’t make it back to see him. Never got to hold his hand again, or kiss his stupid beautiful face, or wish him goodbye. And now…

Now, she knows she never will.

The loss hits her in the stomach like a physical blow. She feels like she might be sick. 

_Stop it_ , Rose chides herself. _Don’t be stupid. It doesn’t matter if he’s got a different face. It’s still him. He’s still the Doctor._

“Wow,” she breathes, eyes fluttering back open to find him watching her, his expression hopeful, almost expectant. New face or not, she remembers that look very well. “Sorry. It’s just a lot to take in.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I just can’t believe it’s you.” Shaking her head, Rose backpedals. “I mean, not because of the regeneration, just, it’s been so long, all this time and it’s finally you. And you’re just so—”

“Different?” he asks with a sad smile.

Lips pursed, Rose nods.

“Good different or bad different?”

Rose’s mouth quirks in a smile of its own. “Just different,” she replies, and the Doctor’s grin broadens into something genuine then. And the sight is glorious, flooding Rose’s skull with such an effusive and bubbling happiness that she’s got to let it out somehow or else she’ll burst, so she rewards the Doctor with another hug, and oh, if that isn’t the very best feeling in the multiverse, Rose doesn’t know what is. He looks and sounds so strange and Rose misses his previous selves like her lungs need oxygen but he’s here and he’s alive and he’s real, it’s not a horrible pocket universe where everything’s gone to hell, it’s not a dream, it’s not a nightmare. It’s _him_. He hums happily, a cheeky thing deep in his throat just like she remembers, and Rose’s head swims with bittersweet joy.

“How did it happen?” she asks. “The regeneration, I mean.”

“Wrong Dalek, wrong time.”

Rose remembers the cries of the fallen on the Game Station, oh so long ago, and she can’t repress the shudder that runs through her. She hates that she wasn’t here for him when it happened. She _hates_ it.

“Did it hurt?” she asks softly, pulling away.

“Not as much as other things,” he replies, unable to meet her eyes. Shaking the memory away, the Doctor shoots Rose a smile, more for her benefit than his, she suspects. “What about you, though? How did you get back? How did you get in _here_? That sort of thing should be—”

“Impossible?”

He chuckles. “You’d think I would have figured out by now that nothing can stop Rose Tyler. But really, though—how did you do it?”

Rose replies with a grin, poking her tongue between her teeth the way she used to. The smile feels a little forced, too many feelings competing in her head for attention, but hey, she can fake it ‘til she makes it, right? “I guess I could tell you,” she teases, “but it wouldn’t be nearly as impressive as showing you, would it?”

“What, right now?”

“Well, yeah,” Rose laughs. “I can’t imagine you want to hang around here any longer than you’ve got to. I mean, what are you even doing here—and what is this place, anyway? Why’s everyone treating you like some kind of king or something? And what’s with that cheap Gladiator nonsense outside? Why haven’t you put a stop to it?”

“Ah, goodness, that’s quite a lot of questions, isn’t it,” says the Doctor, scratching the back of his neck.

A few moments pass in silence. It’s only a little awkward.

Eventually Rose raises an eyebrow, half in question, half in concern. There’s no way he didn’t hear her.

“Doctor?” she prompts.

“Oh, did you mean me to answer?” the Doctor asks.

Rose nods.

“Right. Erm, like I said, quite a lot of questions, but they’ve sort of all got the same short answer, funny enough, and that would be that I haven’t got much of a say in things round here, for a number of reasons, not to mention that all my trusty machines are gone.”

“Machines…? Oh my god, you don’t mean the TARDIS?” Rose gasps, aghast. “Gone, as in—?”

“Kaput, moot, put out to pasture, kicked the bucket and bought the farm it came from. The TARDIS and the screwdriver both, I’m afraid. Bit of a bummer, the whole rescuing-people, holier-than-thou, self-righteous-martyred-wanderer act is a little difficult to pull off without them.”

Rose swears under her breath. “God, Doctor,” she says, grasping both of his gloved hands in hers. “I’m so sorry.”

The Doctor nods numbly.

“What happened?”

He winces. “Ah, actually, I’d sort of rather not think about it at the moment, if you don’t mind.”

“Yeah, sure,” Rose says quickly, blinking back the tears that threaten to overwhelm her. “Of course.”

Silence again, but this time it hardly matters; Rose wouldn’t be able to hear anything over the hurt, anyway. Over the past few years, she had braced herself for all manner of possibilities—that the Doctor would have regenerated again, that he would have moved on, that he would have filled the Rose-shaped hole in his life with a bright and shiny new companion that left no room for her anymore. Yet, while it still burns to look at him—it will for a while yet, Rose imagines—it helps a little that Rose knew it might happen. Less of a gasping shock, more of an unhoped-for eventuality. But never, _never_ in her wildest dreams had Rose ever imagined that anything would happen to the TARDIS. The revelation is staggering.

(Dimly, she wishes the Doctor would take off his gloves so she could hold his hands properly. She’s sure he has his reasons for wearing them—maybe this new incarnation is something of a germaphobe? Maybe he’s averse to touch now?—but she can’t help but feel that the leather cancels out most of the comfort inherent in simple skin-on-skin contact, erecting a barrier in more ways than one.) 

“But anyway,” prompts the Doctor, withdrawing his hands as he slaps on a veneer of cheerfulness, same as always. “What was that you were saying about leaving…?”

“Right, of course.” Shaking herself, Rose holds up her wrist for the Doctor’s observation, displaying the watch strapped around it. “Updated dimension-hopper, meet the Doctor; Doctor, meet the updated dimension-hopper.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” says the Doctor to the hopper with a mock-salute.

“Just gotta reboot the initialization process, then I’ll hop back to the other universe, nab another hopper, and get us both away from all this—whatever this is,” Rose says, wrinkling her nose in disgust at their surroundings. “After we take care of the stars, let’s fix whatever’s gone wrong with this rubbish planet, yeah? Someone’s gotta let these people know that no one’s impressed with that sword-and-sorcery bit anymore.”

The Doctor’s eyes widen amidst the dimension-hopper’s downward-counting chirp. “What’s that about stars?”

“You know, the stars going out. Hasn’t that started happening here yet?”

“I wouldn’t say it’s happening so much as it already happened.”

The hopper beeps several times, informing Rose that she’s good to jump, but she’s too busy staring at the Doctor in bewilderment. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, more _happened_ and then _un-happened_ , really.”

Shaking her head, confused, Rose tries to sort through her racing thoughts. “But that doesn’t make sense. It had only just started in that pocket universe, and we’re ahead of both of you—”

“Pocket universe, you say—?”

Cutting through their words with a _tweet-tweet-tweet_ , the hopper lets Rose know, insistently, that if she’s going to jump, she needs to do it right now, unless she wants to wait another thirty minutes. And she most emphatically does not; she has spent more than enough time waiting over the last few years.

“Okay, definitely add that to the list of things we’re gonna have to talk about,” Rose says, weaving her arm through the Doctor’s. “For now, just hang on til I get back. Hold on tight.”

“Oh, Rose Tyler, always,” says the Doctor, smiling. “But I should warn you—”

With a wink and a megawatt-bright grin, Rose hits the button that will take her back home.

And—

Nothing.

Humming in surprise, Rose taps the button on her wristwatch again. She must’ve hit it wrong the first time, her fingers gone twitchy in all her nervous excitement. When nothing happens again, she presses the button once more, intently this time.

Still nothing.

“Erm, okay,” Rose laughs shakily, bringing the wristwatch up to her ear, like maybe she’ll hear what went wrong in its inner workings somehow. “Weird, that’s never happened before.”

“That’s sort of what I was trying to tell you,” the Doctor sighs, pulling back. “I don’t think it’s going to work.”

He swallows, and Rose’s stomach churns as the Doctor visibly braces himself for what’s bound to be an unpleasant announcement.

“There’s no way off this planet, Rose,” the Doctor says, slowly. “We’re trapped.”


	3. The Empty Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Just how much has this place changed him? What has this place done to him?)

It’s surreal, how quickly they lapse into some of their old patterns.

(It’s strange, how they don’t lapse at all into others.)

After sprinting down a series of halls and staircases down to his workshop (or “the dungeon” as the Doctor refers to it), without so much as a glance back to see if Rose can keep up in her gown and heels (she can’t, so she slips the heels off and gathers them in her hand with her skirts while she runs), the Doctor pores over the dimension-hopper by the light of a crystal lamp. Breathless with anticipation, squirming in her uncomfortably tight bodice, Rose slips the shoes back on, pulling up her skirts and a stool so she can watch him work.

Swap out the gown for jeans and a hoodie, the surrounding stone walls for coral, and add a rumbling background hum, and they could almost be back on the TARDIS, chatting while the Doctor cobbles together spare bits into some kind of miraculous invention to help them on their adventure to Jupiter or Zrallor X or The Low Kirchief’s Gilded Mausoleum. Or more accurately, Rose tries to chat; the Doctor seems too intently focused on his project to provide satisfactory answers to very many of her questions, brow furrowed and lips pressed tight as he tinkers with the hopper here, makes adjustments there. A pity—after all her work on the Cannon, Rose might actually understand a bit of his technobabble for once (though her suggestion of such just makes the Doctor bark out a short and disbelieving laugh. Still rude, then). Eventually, Rose abandons any attempts to talk shop, casting aside technical anecdotes for information on the Doctor’s last few years, specifically how he ended up here.

(To say this task is like _pulling teeth_ hardly does it justice; it would be more accurate to say the job is like _trying to get an unwilling patient to admit they have teeth in the first place_.)

“Okay,” Rose says, “so, let me get this straight. The stars going out was just a byproduct of your standard run-of-the-mill Dalek nonsense.”

“Yep.”

“But all that’s resolved now thanks to you, via the usual hand-waving and time magic.”

“Yep.”

“And now all the Time Lords are back somehow, too, cos why not.”

“Yep.”

“And as thanks for all your hard work, they exiled you here, to a prison planet?”

The Doctor heaves an impatient sigh. “Yes, quite. Good to see you’ve maintained your ability to memorize and regurgitate basic information over the years.”

Rose chooses to ignore the barb; if the Doctor has been imprisoned here as long as it seems, it only makes sense he’d have misplaced a couple of social norms—not that he ever kept particularly good track of them to begin with.

“Why, though?” Rose asks.

Shrugging, the Doctor slips on a pair of specs, squinting at the half-disassembled dimension-hopper splayed open on the table before him. Something about its guts exposed to the open air and shining bright beneath the worklamp reminds Rose of a frog being dissected in health class, makes her feel a little queasy.

“Fear,” the Doctor eventually replies, prying out a piece of the hopper with a pair of fine tweezers. “Fear, plain and simple. I have, on occasion, made things a little difficult for them, you see.”

“You? Never,” Rose teases, bumping his shoulder with hers.

Behind his specs, the Doctor’s eyes flash with something that could almost be annoyance, but maybe it’s just a trick of the light. “Couldn’t properly control me, couldn’t properly kill me—it never quite seems to stick, even if it’s a death of the supposedly-permanent variety,” he muses. “Not to mention you never know when a spare genius may come in handy. So, what do you do with the errant Time Lord who’s simultaneously responsible for your inconvenient time-death and subsequent joyous resurrection?”

The hopper lying in pieces in front of him, the Doctor scans each in turn with the sonic, which, Rose notes with a small pang, looks every bit as different from its previous incarnation as the Doctor does. “Why, you make an example of him, of course,” he continues cheerfully. “Strand him on some backwater rock full of barbaric rubes in some unknown corner of the universe, enclose the entire thing in an impenetrable looping EMP field that fries the gears of any kind of transport more technologically advanced than a rowboat, and point and laugh at him while he lives out his remaining regenerations without the ability to so much as reconfigure a Time Rotor, much less wreak havoc across the universe.”

He wrenches apart a spare component with perhaps more force than is entirely necessary. “The perfect punishment for the perfect fucking crime,” he mutters, grimacing in disgust.

The cursing surprises Rose a little—has she ever heard the Doctor properly swear before?—but even the Doctor has got his limits, Rose knows, and his time on this so-called barbaric planet must have taken its toll. She wonders exactly how long he’s been here in this nameless place, wherever and whatever _here_ actually is.

(She wonders what has happened to him in his time here, how much a place like this could change somebody.)

“So, tell me more about this prison planet,” says Rose, glancing at the marble walls all around them, painted in flickering shadow by the crystal worklamps. “It’s all sort of posh for that, isn’t it?”

“I think you and I have got different definitions of _posh_.”

Rose laughs. “I think you and I have got different definitions of _prison_. Or do all Time Lord jails look like something King Arthur’d live in? And why all that bit out in the arena, anyway? Is it some sort of twisted Time Lord entertainment thing?”

“You really don’t let up with the questions, do you?” the Doctor says irritably.

Taken aback, Rose furrows her brow in concern, but she must have misinterpreted his tone, because not a second later he’s shooting her a wide, winning smile, one she can’t help but return. It’s like magic, the way her lips stretch to mirror his, like she couldn’t stop even if she wanted to. Thank god _some_ things are still the same.

“What?” she asks, laughing.

“Oh, nothing.” He returns to his work, but his smile stays firmly in place, as if plastered there. “Had a bit of déjà vu is all. Scoping out evidence and piecing together the clues, just like the good ol’ days. Rose and the Doctor.”

“The old team,” Rose supplies.

“Holmes and Watson,” the Doctor beams.

“Elton and Bernie.”

“Jekyll and Hyde.”

“What on earth’d you want to be them for?” laughs Rose.

“Why not?”

“Isn’t one of them a beast? Just a wild animal in the shape of a man?”

The Doctor chuckles. “Well, that pretty much describes you, doesn’t it?”

“Oi,” Rose laughs. She’s a little disgruntled at the insult, but she playfully swats his arm all the same. “Don’t go saying any of that _ape_ stuff again. That’s one thing from my first Doctor that I don’t miss.”

“ _Your_ Doctor?” the Doctor asks slyly, one eyebrow piqued.

Warmth blossoms across Rose’s cheeks as she registers the implications of her statement, his reaction after. But rather than scoot it under the rug like she would have done once upon a time, when she was so much younger and still had so, so much to learn, she simply looks the Doctor square in the eye, and smiles.

“Yeah, that’s right,” she says, her stomach flipping funny little somersaults in her gut all the while. “My Doctor.”

The Doctor chuckles deep in his throat, a funny little noise that would sound patronizing coming from anyone but him. “Been thinking like that for a while now, have you?”

“Might’ve done.”

“Rather possessive of you.”

“Pretty rich coming from He-Who-Glowers-At-Pretty-Boys.”

“Good point. Maybe it’s _my Rose_ instead, ever think of that?”

Her stomach flutters. “Nah, _my Doctor’s_ got a better ring to it.”

“Hmm,” he replies thoughtfully. Braiding together bits of wire, the Doctor furrows his brow in concentration, his tongue peeking pinkly between his teeth. Rose can’t help but wonder if he subconsciously absorbed the gesture from her. “Don’t know if I’ve ever belonged to someone before.”

“How does it feel?”

The Doctor glances up at her. “Risky. But I’ve always liked a bit of danger,” he says, with a wink.

Warmth floods through Rose and she beams at him like an idiot as the hopper beeps in his hands, a cheerful _tweet-a-tweet-tweet_ that makes the Doctor whoop and slap his thigh. “And that right there, do you know what that sound is? That’s the new EMP-resistant multi-passenger pre-initialization process, letting us know we’ll be ready for a jump out of this hellhole any moment now,” the Doctor says gleefully. “That, Rose Tyler, is the sound of victory. We do indeed make quite the team, don’t we?”

He holds the half-disassembled hopper out to her expectantly, his smile radiating pure joy, and maybe it’s just the tightness of her corset taking her breath away, but it’s like all the air has left the room. He may look and sound like a stranger, his edges may be rough and his words too, but he’s the closest thing to the Doctor that Rose has seen in years—he _is_ the Doctor—and _Christ,_ does Rose want to kiss him—so that’s exactly what she does. On impulse, her heart hammering madly in her ears, she leans forward, accepting the hopper as she bridges the distance between them so she can press the gentlest of kisses to the Doctor’s lips.

Fighting the emotion that threatens to well up upon first contact—the nights of longing and waiting and pining and hoping, the brief handful of moments in which she allowed herself to imagine that any of this might be possible, what it would all look like, how it would all _feel_ —Rose closes her eyes, preparing to lose herself in the kiss. To happily drown. But no more than a second after her lips touch his, the Doctor violently jerks back, punctuating the air with a knife-sharp gasp as he scrambles away from her.

The two of them stare at each other, wide-eyed, Rose frowning in confusion, the Doctor watching her warily, wide-eyed. He looks for all the world like someone who’s just had a nasty electric shock, a caged prisoner backing into the corner after a bad bout with a cattle-prod.

(Admittedly, she hadn’t given him much warning, but how had she managed to misread the moment so badly? How had she managed to so badly misread _him_?)

“Erm, sorry,” Rose says shakily, her toes clenching uncomfortably in their pumps. She runs a hand through her hair, her cheeks flushing flame-red from embarrassment. “I just assumed…”

Chest heaving with exertion, the Doctor watches her wordlessly, eyes wild and unblinking. Rose wonders. It’s a bit much, isn’t it, his reaction? She understands if her actions caught him a little off-guard, but surely a mere chaste kiss wouldn’t be enough to throw someone so violently off-kilter. She remembers Cassandra using her hands to draw him close and practically snog his face off, apropos of literally nothing, and certainly he was a little stunned afterward, but nothing like this. Nothing at all like this.

“I’m sorry,” Rose repeats.

(Just how much has this place changed him? What has this place done to him?)

“Doctor?” Rose asks when he doesn’t respond, concerned. “Are you all right?”

A quiet knock at the door breaks the Doctor’s manic silence, and secretly, Rose is glad for the distraction. “What is it?” the Doctor snaps, causing Rose to jump.

“So sorry, your Lordship,” peeps a timid voice on the other side of the heavy wooden door. “But you said if we had any news—”

Within several long strides the Doctor has crossed the room, yanking open the door to reveal a furry mammalian young attendant trembling in the hallway. It’s difficult for Rose to make out the Doctor’s words, his back turned to her and his voice as low as it is, but she can see in the sharp set of his shoulders that he’s working to hide tension, nearly trembling with the effort of keeping himself calm.

“What did I say about interrupting me here?” Rose can just barely hear him say.

The attendant shrinks away from him, unable to meet his gaze. “You said _Never ever_ , your Lordship.”

“Excellent, so your hearing is unimpaired at least, as is your memory. Why, then, are you darkening my door now? Which part of _never_ or _ever_ escaped your understanding? What part of my instructions did your Cretaceous-era brain manage to so woefully misconstrue?”

The attendant’s gaze flickers down to the sonic, lying prone on the table where the Doctor dropped it, and she flinches. Rose wonders at that.

“But, my Lordship,” the attendant stammers. “You also said that—”

“It’s _Your_ Lordship,” the Doctor snaps, and the attendant shrinks away from him. “And you would do well to remember that.”

He slams the door in the attendant’s face before she can reply, heaving an irritated sigh. For a moment, he just stands there, face to the door, muttering under his breath, ostensibly to himself, though Rose honestly can’t tell—she can’t make out anything he’s saying, now. She’s willing to bet it’s nothing good, though.

(Nothing about this feels good.)

Rose shakes herself. She’s being unfair. Surely that’s it. He’s just a little different now, that’s all this is. He’s a little different, new body, new personality, landlocked on a new and horrible planet, but he’s got all the same experience, the same memories, the same important stuff, and she’s just having trouble adjusting.

It’s not him. It’s her. It’s got to be.

Besides, it isn’t unlike the Doctor to be inconsiderate, rude, even a little cruel at times, much as Rose hates to admit it. He is, after all, the man who took her to see the destruction of her home planet for their first date, who touted the nonconsensual use of dead bodies as “recycling” and seemed to think that life as a paving slab was, in any way, acceptable—the same man who agreed to let her watch her father die in the street, who destroyed Harriet Jones’ life with only six simple words and no second thoughts. Surely this behavior isn’t any worse than what Rose has witnessed before, or there must be context that she’s missing, or his time on this planet has been harder on him than she knows. Maybe he’s rankled by his powerlessness here, or maybe he has grown numb to it all, yet another series of tragedies marring a landscape already pitted and scorched with death and loss. Maybe it’s the Time War all over again and he’s actually sad and weary behind that ever-present smile, secretly crushed beneath the great stone wheel of resignation as dozens or possibly hundreds of people die in the sand before him day after day—which is something he surely doesn’t have any control over, or surely he would have stopped it by now. Surely Rose is just overreacting to things.

Surely the suspicion slowly ramping up in her gut is wrong.

(Why would that girl look at the sonic like she was afraid of it?)

“Boy, I tell you, the help these days,” Rose says, forcing out the joke despite the nausea rising in her throat. She grips the hopper a little too tightly. “Downright shame, isn’t it?”

(Please, _please_ let him know it’s a joke.)

She throws her hands up in the air helplessly. “What are you gonna do?”

“Tell me about it,” grumps the Doctor.

Rose swallows. “A little useless, aren’t they?”

“Preaching to the choir.”

“You’d think they’d have at least a little respect for your Lordship.”

A sigh. “Yes, you would think that, wouldn’t you?”

“Why do they call you that, anyway?” Rose asks, fighting to keep her voice casual. Inconspicuous. Her grip around the hopper is slippery with sweat, and suddenly her gown is claustrophobic, clinging to her, strangling the air out of her lungs even worse than before. “I mean, probably just because of the whole superior species thing, right? Everything just sort of falling into its natural order, you rising to your rightful place at the top?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“Uh-huh. Except, I thought you said you were imprisoned here?”

“Oh, I was,” the Doctor mutters darkly. “I may be at the top of the food chain in this dungeon, but it’s still a dungeon, believe me.”

“Yeah, right,” says Rose, her breath tightening in her throat. “Is that why that girl was so afraid of you just now?”

The Doctor’s head quirks back in her direction, but he doesn’t turn back around to face her. Instead, his shoulders tighten, almost imperceptibly. “Couldn’t tell you, really,” he says. “Probably just your standard barbaric fear of tech and anyone associated with it. Likely the dratted thing hasn’t so much as come in contact with a toaster before I arrived. But it is little more than a circus animal, after all.”

“Makes sense,” Rose says coolly despite the several thousand alarm bells that have begun ringing out in her skull, because when has the Doctor ever referred to a sentient being as _it_? “‘Cept you said earlier that all your _machines_ were gone. But you’ve got a sonic right there.”

The Doctor faces her with a shrug and a grin. “Just built a new one, didn’t I?”

“Of course, makes sense, what with all the materials available to you here, the _barbarism_ and the _nothing-more-advanced-than-a-rowboat_ and all.”

“Oh, you know me,” says the Doctor, plucking his screwdriver off the table. “I’m resourceful.”

“You’re _off,_ is what you are,” Rose insists, stepping back.

Eying her suspiciously, the Doctor laughs. It’s a surprisingly nasty sound, nothing like before, and did his teeth always look so sharp, or so many? “What a curious little human,” he says, tucking the screwdriver away before wedging his hands in his pockets with a tight squeak of leather against wool. “Careful, now, or you’ll say something I’ll regret.”

“Sort of like calling the TARDIS a machine? Since when does the Doctor do that?”

“Since now,” replies the Doctor, his grin broadening. 

“And since when would you let something like a missing TARDIS stop you from doing what’s right, anyway?” Rose asks, backing away further, watching the Doctor as he follows after. Slowly, like a lion in tall grass, stalking its prey. Rose doesn’t stop until the worktable is solidly between them.

“Why haven’t you stopped those fights in the arena, Doctor?” she asks.

She swallows. “Are you even really the Doctor?”

“What a question!” the Doctor laughs. “A man changes his face and his voice and his personality and all of a sudden he must be a new person, mustn’t he? What a narrow conception of personhood, what an over-simplified view of the world, what a narrow little mind you have, Miss Tyler.”

Then he leans in over the table, his lips stretching thin and wide like a cheap Halloween mask. “Though I will admit, _I’m not quite feeling myself these days_.”

Rose’s grip tightens on the hopper till her arm shakes with the force of it.

“Who are you?” she asks quietly.

Before the Doctor—or the man who used to be the Doctor, or the man pretending to be—has a chance to answer, the hopper chirps in her hand once more, another chipper _tweet-a-tweet-tweet, tweet-a-tweet-tweet_ shattering the silence. Pulse roaring in her ears, Rose acts without hesitation, smacking the button that will take her home.

And—

Nothing.

Horror washes over Rose like a tidal wave as the man chuckles under his breath.

“Pity,” he murmurs, clicking his tongue in disappointment. “But you know what they say; _If at first you don’t succeed_ —”

Rose bites back a gasp as the man’s gaze flickers up to hers, his eyes dark, now, boring into her like a pair of cold-burning fires.

“Shall we try again, my love?” he asks, mouth curling into a smile, and the second he lunges for her is the second Rose hurls the hopper to the ground and shatters it with her heel.

Quick as a blink, Rose darts off and grabs a tool off the table to chuck at the man’s face but suddenly white-hot pain lances violently through her neck and head, sharp enough that she drops her makeshift weapon with a _clang_ as she doubles over. Glowing white tendrils arc through her vision like lightning before receding, taking the pain with them. Gasping, Rose tries to stand, to run, but the pain strikes again, so hard it throws her to her knees.

“What—” she tries to gasp out, but the pain surges again, like a fire spreading from her throat to her skull to each and every nerve ending in her body, leaving her spasming and helpless. Through the haze of hurt and shock, Rose looks up to see the man aiming his sonic at her—at her collar. The collar that’s so much like the one the attendants all wear, Rose realizes belatedly.

And that girl saw the sonic screwdriver, and she was so afraid—

Swearing, scrambling backward over the floor, Rose reaches up to tear the damned collar off her neck but the man hits her with another blast from the sonic, one strong enough to make her shout. The pain strikes like a lorry, twisting and wrenching her muscles and clenching the air from her lungs. Choking, Rose slumps to her hands and knees. Black bleeds into the edges of her vision, ink creeping in at the corners, and she knows she hasn’t got long before her body surrenders.

“Who are you?” she spits out, fighting for air, for control, for _anything_.

“Finally! A question worth asking,” the man chuckles. “Though to be quite honest with you, I haven’t really had a proper name for a while now.”

Rose can’t make him out through her darkening field of vision, but she can hear his footsteps approaching, swears she can hear his smile, stretching wide and vicious over rows of eager teeth.

“But,” says the man’s voice, suddenly very close now, “you can call me _Master_.”

His laughter is the last thing Rose hears before darkness swallows her.


	4. Fear Him

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Now don’t you do that,” he says, suddenly stern and very south-London, pouting at Rose in mock admonishment. “Don’t you do that Very Bad Thing. You’ve got to listen to me, I’m the Doctor! I’m a poncy self-righteous twat with my head buried so far up my cobweb-filled arse it’s been centuries since it last saw the light of day!"

_Cold pain awake hurt_

Why

_Doctor—_

Rose wakes with a gasp, flinching at the ache that flares dully through her head. Icy water drips down her face in rivulets, and she wipes the great fat droplets out of her eyes, gingerly pushing herself up to a sitting position on the couch—

Wait. The _couch…?_

Confusion mounting with every passing moment, Rose scans the room around her, discerning what little she can in the darkness; it’s that castle-place, still, from the looks of it. Stone meets her eyes at every turn, drapes stretching gently from column-to-column, swaying lazily in the night air, and it’s quiet in here, oh-so-quiet. The softness beneath her legs must surely be plush cushions and yes, the thing behind her is definitely the back of a couch.

She’s in a fancy dress. In a castle. Recovering from a fainting-spell on a fainting-couch. The only way it would be cheesier, she thinks, is if she were chained to a set of train tracks instead.

“Good morning, sweetheart,” drawls a voice somewhere out of the darkness, and Rose jumps. “Sleep well?”

Rose glares at the Doctor—no, not the Doctor, the man from before, that terrible man, _pretending_ to be the Doctor, but how did he have all of the Doctor’s memories, how did he know so much?—and he steps out of the shadows, holding a crystal goblet in one gloved hand. Water drips down the goblet’s sides, splatting loudly onto the floor and the man’s shoes, but he doesn’t seem to notice. His attention is focused solely on Rose. He watches her, his face blank, impassive, eyes blinking just a little too slowly in the dim light, like a lizard. Like a snake.

 _The Master_ , Rose remembers, and she shivers.

“Hullo? Master to Rose,” the Master says, waving a hand. “I asked you a question. Do you care to answer?”

“Not really,” Rose replies.

The Master chuckles. “Rude, but then you never were a morning person, were you?”

“How do you know that?”

“Oh, I’ve got my ways.” Dipping his gloved fingers into the goblet, the Master draws out a palmful of water and flicks it into Rose’s face. She forces herself not to flinch at the icy-cold deluge. “You’ll find that out soon enough.”

For a half-second, Rose considers making a run for it (or better yet, making a run at him), but she can just see the top of the sonic screwdriver sticking out of his jacket-pocket, and the memory of the pain it caused is still fresh, still raw. Unthinking, she almost raises her hand to the collar sitting heavy on her neck, until she catches the Master’s eyes, watching her patiently, almost gleefully. 

_Do it,_ he seems to be saying. _Do something stupid._ I dare you.

Rose’s hand falls to her side and clenches stubbornly in her skirts instead.

“Who are you?” she asks sharply, shaking water out of her eyes. “Not your name,” she snaps before he has a chance to reply. “I already know that. I want to know who you really are, and why you’re really imprisoned here, and why you pretended to be the Doctor.”

The Master cocks his head to one side, inquisitive. “Well, aren’t you a curious little kitten?” he laughs.

“You’ve got two hearts, so you must be a Time Lord too, right?” asks Rose, almost speaking to herself, more than him. “But the Doctor said he was the only one left, after the War. How’d you survive?”

“Careful now, darling,” he replies. “You know what they say about cats and curiosity.”

“Enough bullshit. Cut to the chase.”

Tutting in disapproval, the Master shakes his head. “My my my,” he sighs. “What a nasty little mouth you’ve got on you. Surely you’d never say such a thing in front of your precious Doctor. You must know he doesn’t approve of such crude language.”

“We could always call him up and find out for sure.”

The Master barks out a laugh. “That isn’t possible for a variety of reasons, I’m afraid— _numero uno_ being that your Doctor’s more than a little bit dead.”

Suddenly all the hurt in Rose’s body feels very far away. A vision of a gurney and a still hand floods her memory; she fights to keep her face calm and composed as panic surges in her chest, strangling her. A strange buzzing sound fills her ears like a nest of angry-buzzing wasps.

She is very, very cold.

Rose forces herself not to shiver. “I don’t believe you,” she says calmly.

The Master grins a Jack-o-Lantern’s smile _._ “You should.”

“No,” Rose replies with a sharp shake of her head. “If he was dead, you would said he _didn’t_ approve. You said he _doesn’t_.”

“Well, I never!” says the Master gleefully. “Turns out you’ve got some cognitive capacity, after all! What a delightful surprise. Though to be fair, the truth was going to come up sooner or later, anyway. Only a matter of time.”

“So he is alive,” Rose says, relief washing over her.

The Master nods. “For the moment.”

Allowing her eyes to shutter closed, Rose takes just the briefest of moments to thank her lucky stars back home, all the ones that haven’t disappeared yet. “How do you know so much about him, anyway?” she asks. “How did you know who I was, back at the tournament? Just how much do you know?”

Humming thoughtfully, the Master considers for a moment, fingers tapping idly against the cup in his hands. “Nah,” he says, “I’m much more interested in talking about you, pet. Now tell me—” and here he plonks down on the couch next to Rose, ignoring how she shifts as far away from him as she can, “—just what will it take to get you to cooperate?”

“With what?”

“Well, with me, naturally.”

Rose eyes him warily. “Why? What do you want?”

“Just a smidge of your help.” The Master tilts his goblet this way and that, watching the motion of the water inside, as if it’s all terribly fascinating. “Well, that, and a decent cappuccino, but first things first.”

“I’m not helping you off this planet.”

“Nor could you,” the Master replies. “If I haven’t figured out a way off, then you certainly can’t, though it’s cute you thought that was a possibility. No; your assistance will be of a different nature,” he continues thoughtfully. “Something more along the lines of _bait and switch_ , _lure and hook_ , _catch and release_. Without the release.”

He shoots a sly smile her way. “Something to do with our mutual friend. Something a lot more _personal_ , if you know what I mean.”

Rose shakes her head in confusion, running over his words in her mind. Then it dawns on her. 

“You want to use me,” she realizes aloud, “to get the Doctor here. To steal the TARDIS.” 

“Bingo!” shouts the Master in delight, clapping his hands together heedless of the water that sloshes from his cup. “Right in one.”

Rose stares at him. “You’ve got to be joking.”

“Oh, I very much am not,” the Master says pleasantly. “I can’t get off this planet, but you know what can? A TARDIS. And guess who’s got one of those, along with buckets and buckets of horrendously boring and otherwise useless sentimentalism for a certain blonde and insignificant squalling little beastie?”

“No. No way.”

“Yes. Yes way,” says the Master. “And in another way, really, I suppose I should be thanking you right now. My other plan was to modify your little hopper, use that to get off this rock and track the Doctor down. But thanks to your Stone Age technology and your oh-so-elegant solution of stamping the thing to smithereens, now, we can jump straight to the end goal. No more wasting time looking for him—we’ll bring him straight to us!”

“I’m not gonna help you trap the Doctor,” Rose says loudly.

“Oh, come on. You barely know me—certainly not well enough to know all the reasons why you shouldn’t help me.” The Master pauses, thinking, as he wipes one damp glove on Rose’s skirt. “Granted, there are many, but there’s no reason for you to be so stubborn about it. So why don’t you just cooperate, like a good little girl?”

A harsh laugh. “How about you take this collar off me first?”

“How about you stop wasting my time?”

“Remove the collar or you get nothing.”

“Comply or I’ll kill you.”

“Good luck getting help from my corpse.”

The Master’s eyes flash and for a second Rose is so, _so_ certain he’ll shift, fast as a blink, turning his sonic on her collar again or maybe even ripping it off so he can wrap his hands round her throat, fingers _squeeze-squeeze-squeezing_ the life out of her, but instead he just grins.

That’s…unsettling.

“How about,” the Master muses, pretending to consider, “you give me what I want, or I kill all of your little friends? Hm? The ones you were helping out in the tournament. How about that?”

Rose doesn’t flinch. “They’re all gonna die in the tournament anyway.”

“Ooh, that’s cold!” laughs the Master. “I mean, you’re not wrong, but still. _Cold_.” 

He taps his chin thoughtfully with the goblet. “I could still kill you, you know. That option is very much still on the table. And what would your Doctor say about that?”

“He’d understand,” Rose replies firmly.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” says the Master, and if Rose didn’t know any better, she’d be tempted to label his tone _soft_. “But then again, maybe you’re right. So damned noble, the both of you. It’s such a nuisance, really.”

With a sigh, the Master sidles up next to Rose, as if they’re just two friends having a casual chat, mates gossiping about the latest celebrity news or office scandal. It’s a very strange contrast to the collar sitting heavy and cold on Rose’s skin.

“Don’t suppose there’s still any hope of convincing you I’m the Doctor?” the Master asks cheerfully.

“Don’t suppose there is. Didn’t work out the first time you tried.”

“And I tell you, it’s a damn shame, Rose. Just a real damn shame,” says the Master, shaking his head. “What a waste of a performance! I had so much more material. Here, look: _Now don’t you do that_ ,” he says, suddenly stern and very south-London, pouting at Rose in mock admonishment. “ _Don’t you do that Very Bad Thing. You’ve got to listen to me, I’m the Doctor! I’m a poncy self-righteous twat with my head buried so far up my cobweb-filled arse it’s been centuries since it last saw the light of day!_ ”

He bumps Rose’s shoulder with his and the gesture is so reminiscent of the Doctor that Rose has to fight not to dry-heave. “Not too shabby, eh?”

“Positively Oscar-worthy,” Rose replies through gritted teeth.

“Thanks, I thought as much,” says the Master, beaming. “Now, back to my earlier question—because I won’t let up until I get the answer I want, see, so you might as well comply now, before I get bored with you. And as the people on this fair planet can attest, you won’t like me when I’m bored. So what’ll it be, love? Your life, or your Doctor?”

Rose doesn’t reply, just stares stonily ahead.

“Oh, Rose Tyler,” the Master says, heaving a disappointed sigh after several long moments tick by in silence. “Rose, Rose, Rose. _A rose by any other name_ —”

“God, can we get on with the killing already?” Rose groans. “Cos honestly, I’d rather die than have yet another idiot feeding me that stupid—”

He aims the sonic at her collar and pain surges through her body with a nasty shock. Spasming backward, Rose’s head cracks against the wall behind her with a sickening _thwack_ that echoes through the room while stars explode behind her eyelids. Copper-taste floods her mouth as blood wells up from where she bit the inside of her cheek. Her eyes start to water as the shock fades, before the pain sets back in, but it’s a short head start; the pain at the back of her head blossoms through quickly, and _hard._

A sound of glass shattering on the tiles and suddenly a set of leatherclad fingers clenches her chin in a steely grip, wrenching her face sideways and forcing her to look the Master in the eyes. Despite herself, Rose gasps at the sudden closeness, the way the Master’s pupils dilate until his irises are nothing but a pool of lightless black.

“Surely by now, you’ve realized that behind this pretty face, I’m a monster,” the Master says, his voice chillingly pleasant for all that his smile is a thin-stretched grimace. “And monsters do bad, bad things to little girls.”

A chill runs down Rose’s spine and brings a violent shudder with it but Rose doesn’t reply and she doesn’t look away, just glares at him with all the hate she can muster, her mouth clenched tight against the swelling blood. _You’re not the only monster in this room_ , she wants to say, but judging by the way he’s clenching the sonic, tightening until the leather squeaks against the casing, more and more as her silence stretches on—oh, leaving him hanging in the quiet is _so_ much better.

“I can break you,” the Master breathes, chest heaving beneath the confines of his tailored suit. “I can break you, and I will, and it will be so, so very easy. And how do you think your beloved Doctor will react to that, hm? What do you think it will do to him, _just how much will it tear him up inside,_ to see the bloody, mangled, twisted husk of a broken and empty thing that used to be the woman he loves?”

Rose spits in his face.

With a dark chuckle, the Master thumbs at the blood and spittle where it landed on the corner of his mouth, his tongue darting out to taste the traces left behind. “Iron-deficient,” he says. “You really should consider a daily supplement, sweetheart.”

He pushes off the couch and strides away into the shadows, crystal shards from his dropped goblet crunching beneath his heel. The click of a handle and splinter of light in the semi-darkness let Rose know that he has reached the door.

“Oh, don’t worry, darling; I shan’t be gone too long,” the Master says, pausing long enough to flash Rose a winning smile. “Wouldn’t want you to get lonely. Only be warned: the rest of our conversations might not be so pleasant. Next time you don’t give me what I want? Somebody dies, and they die nasty.”

“My condolences to your widow,” Rose shoots back.

Laughing gaily, as if Rose just told the most _charming_ after-dinner joke, the Master leaves, the door clicking quietly shut behind him, locking afterward. Darkness and blessed silence filter back in, and Rose relaxes just the littlest bit, slumping back against the couch, wincing when her head touches the wall behind her. She doesn’t feel the telltale warmth of blood matting her hair, but she’s definitely bruised back there, probably going to swell, certainly going to hurt for the next few days.

Doesn’t matter. She’ll be fine; she’s had far worse. It won’t stop her from trying to escape. And it certainly won’t change her mind about protecting the Doctor. It doesn’t matter how badly she wants to see him, doesn’t matter how much the longing hurts even worse than the pain splitting the back of her skull. She will not do anything to compromise him. She’ll die first.

It’s what he’d do for her. He’d understand.

He will understand.

Willing her muscles to unwind, Rose lets out a long-trapped sigh, surrendering to the exhaustion that washes over her.

She sleeps.

**Author's Note:**

> If you wish to avoid spoilers at all costs, please stop reading this note and proceed to go about the rest of your day! ❤︎ If you enjoy/prefer knowing certain things upfront for any reason, please continue for additional tags that definitely qualify as spoilers, but may let you know whether this is a fic you would enjoy or would prefer to skip: this fic involves mistaken/falsified identity, i.e., Dhawan!Master briefly posing as a regeneration of the Doctor. Don't worry, there is absolutely zero sexual violence in this fic; the M rating is for language, canon-typical violence, and 1000% consensual smut between Rose and the Doctor in future chapter(s). As for the Doctor, the regenerations you will encounter in this fic are the metacrisis Tenth Doctor and the Eleventh Doctor. It is ultimately a Rose/Tentoo tale, and is basically a what-if exploring what could have happened if the Dimension Cannon brought Rose back to her original universe at a different point in the timeline. Neither Rose nor any of the Doctors die. Enjoy, and if you have any questions or concerns, don't hesitate to reach out! ❤︎


End file.
